The High Court of London has allowed self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator Craig Wright to file a lawsuit against Bitcoin Core developers.
The company represents the interests of Wright's Tulip Trading Limited (TTL). There are 16 developers as defendants, including Jonas Schnelli, Peter Wülle, Marco Falke, and Peter Todd. The lawyers noted that they all reside outside the UK.
According to Ontier partner Paul Ferguson, if legal ownership of assets is provable, Bitcoin developers are required to provide a refund. He claims they are capable of injecting code that allows Wright to regain control of the cryptocurrency.
Peter Todd said in a comment to Reuters that Wright never proved his ownership of the crypto. According to the developer, bitcoin is not subject to "arbitrary withdrawal".
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“If we allow the seizure and transfer of coins by court order, it would put the cryptocurrency at risk of being stolen as a result of abuse of this erroneous precedent,” added Todd.
According to the pre-trial claim, on February 5, 2020, unknown persons hacked into Wright's computer and appropriated private keys from two TTL addresses. The plaintiff demanded that the developers regain control of the company over bitcoins.
The document lists two addresses that Wright had previously attributed to himself. In June 2020, the head of the WizSec research group, Kim Nilsson, confirmed that 80,000 BTC allegedly belonging to the self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator in one of the wallets were stolen from Mt.Gox in March 2011 and have not been moved since then.
31,000 BTC are located on one of the specified addresses, and 79,957 BTC on the second. At the time of writing, the total value of the coins is $ 5.6 billion.
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Earlier, Wright demanded that Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org remove the Bitcoin white paper, accusing them of copyright infringement.
Recall that in April 2021, the court allowed the self-proclaimed creator of the first cryptocurrency to file a lawsuit against the owner of the Bitcoin.org website under the pseudonym Cobra.